\u201cEvery place I went, they\u2019re like \u2018Conan was here,\u2019\u201d Kimmel said. \u201cWhat the Smurfs are to Belgium, Conan is to Ireland. He is everywhere you go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Noting that he\u2019s \u201c100 percent Irish,\u201d as his family immigrated from the Emerald Isle to America, O\u2019Brien spoke about a previous trip he took to the country, when he got a chance to visit where his great-grandfather, Thomas O\u2019Brien, once lived in Galbally, Ireland. The opportunity came up while he was filming a 2024 episode of his Emmy-winning travelogue series \u201cConan O\u2019Brien Must Go.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had these jokes loaded up, we had props, funny things we were going to do. I was going to try out some \u2018Train Dreams\u2019 material,\u201d O\u2019Brien joked. \u201cBut I got there, and I did not expect this because I\u2019m not someone that wears my emotions on my sleeves, but I got emotional. It\u2019s very powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n
O\u2019Brien revealed that his great-grandfather was a tenant farmer and lived on a \u201cvery small plot of land\u201d that he didn\u2019t own. Struggling to get by, he made the difficult decision to leave his homeland.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t have money, and he needed to move on because it wasn\u2019t working,\u201d explained O\u2019Brien. \u201cSo he left and went to America, and here I am a couple generations later.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI have incredible empathy for people who have immigrated to another country,\u201d he added. \u201cOften it\u2019s people who are coming to a country where they don\u2019t speak the language, and they have to spend their entire lives just getting things started for the next generation.\u201d<\/p>\n
O\u2019Brien revealed that he was \u201covercome\u201d by emotion while thinking about his great-grandfather\u2019s sacrifice.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was just thinking about this guy, who I\u2019ll never meet, [who] had to do that,\u201d O\u2019Brien said. \u201cI was overcome by the fact that there\u2019s a lot of sadness in that story and in a lot of these stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople leave not because, \u2018Hey, I just want to go have fun in America,\u2019\u201d he added. \u201cThey leave because they have to.\u201d<\/p>\n